Motorola Initiates Brand Rebuild

by Matt Klassen on May 31, 2013

It’s certainly not a stretch to say that Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola hasn’t gone as expected, at least not yet. The once great mobile pioneer lost $271 million for the search engine giant in Q1 2013, is in desperate need of a brand rebuild, and has alienated many others in the Android ecosystem who think Motorola may have an unfair advantage as part of Google. Not only that, but the European Commission has been investigating Motorola for unfair and discriminatory practices against Apple as well.

In an effort to quell this growing storm, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside attempted to address some of these questions in an interview on Wednesday, acknowledging that his company had hit the reset button, of sorts, and reinvented its entire product lineup. Not only that, but the company has moved its production process back to American soil, good news for those who fear our dependence on foreign production.

But even with the news that Motorola is taking its mobile brand in a different direction, making products here at home, heck even with the news that the company’s rumored Moto X smartphone is real and fabulous, one has to wonder if any of this is enough to reinvigorate Motorola and save the Android brand.

While many continue to scoff at the notion that Android is nearing the end of its life, consider the notable company’s who make up the Android ecosystem: You have Samsung, a global leader in the smartphone industry, looking to create and profit off its own operating system; you have HTC, circling the drain after its failed Facebook phone; you have Sony who has yet to do anything with the Android brand, and you have Motorola, who despite access to Google’s bottomless coffers, has yet to produce anything noteworthy…a motley crew of those who don’t need Android and those who can’t seem to make Android work for them.

But that said, Woodside sees his self-proclaimed underdog role in the mobile market as an asset, as the company is able to produce paradigm shifting mobile technology without the persistent pressure to perform right now. “If you think back to transformative changes in the industry, it’s almost never led by a big, incumbent company,” Woodside said, noting the rise of Android from a small company to its presence on almost a billion phones. “You don’t need to be the biggest guy.” Apparently you just need to be the guy with many of the brightest minds in the industry and access to Google’s bottomless pockets…but I digress.

To that end, Woodside did acknowledge the company was developing the new Moto X; the first of the company’s redeveloped product line. The smartphone embodies Motorola’s new corporate focus of rethinking how people interact with their technological devices, and as such it sports what Woodside described as contextual awareness, “It can fire up the camera when he takes it out his pocket (he didn’t explain how), and it will act differently if you are driving 60 miles an hour in a car.”

In the end, it’ll be interesting to see if Motorola can regain some of the swagger the company had as an early pioneer in the mobile space as it attempts to reinvent itself, the Android ecosystem, and even the entire mobile market with its new American-made product lineup.